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| By ensuring that standards are an integral part of their corporate business strategy, companies realize many benefits. Standardization improves efficiency in design, development, and material acquisition. It also conserves money, manpower, time, facilities, and natural resources by minimizing the number of sizes, the variety of processes, the amount of stock, and the paperwork that largely accounts for the overhead costs of manufacturing and selling products.
Using standards, designers can be confident that they are designing products that embody recognized practices and approved levels of safety. Technical risks are minimized by using components that are proven to work for the intended application. By making possible large-scale productions of standard designs, standards encourage better tooling, more careful design, and more precise controls, thereby reducing the production of defective and surplus pieces.
Efficiencies in manufacturing are achieved using standards. By using standardized parts, manufacturers are able to reduce their costs by being able to choose from multiple sources of supply, rather than having to rely on custom materials or parts. Having multiple suppliers means that prices for standardized parts and materials remain competitive. Multiple buying sources for high volume items, use of a wider range of vendors, fewer shipments to check, fewer transactions, and improved delivery times all contribute to the bottom line.
Standards make mass production possible, lower the cost of research and development, and speed up manufacturing. Standards reduce product costs and improve competition. When specifications for materials, fit, safety, performance, and dimensions have been standardized, manufacturers use them - it is good business. |
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Field trips for this lesson:
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